Pages

Saturday, January 03, 2015

Ending Ghosts

Sometimes even being a Jaysaurus isn’t
big enough at all. Sometimes, I feel a little bit like a Jaysaurus is
a t-rex with arms not near long enough to hug anyone and I get kind
of sad-face about that.

There are weird things about being a
Jay, or at least this Jay: I can sense ghosts, now that I can’t
see, but I still destroy them when I come into contact with them.
Even Honcho doesn’t know why: it might be all because I’m from
Outside the universe but I dunno. Lots of other things run into
ghosts just fine and it means it’s really hard to make friends with
them. So I just tag along with Charlie and make sure to stay away
from the ghosts when she goes all ghost-eating, but this time feels
all different: the bindings of the house are broken – human ones
and all the others too. Something had eaten them all, and is hungry
and a lot of kinds of not-nice.

Bad people break more bindings that
good people. This is totally a Jay Fact!

I warn Charlie, so she pulls up in the
god inside her for power and goes into the house to Ask Questions in
a kind of voice that’s really hard to ignore. The parents haven’t
see a thing, because they don’t believe ghosts are real and they
hit their son an awful lot because they said he was lying when they
had to almost know he wasn’t and it hurt their own bindings awful
fierce, like a tooth ache behind the eyes, only for the self.

Charlie
says ghosts don’t go bad often, not like humans go bad. She says
there are Laws, and creatures like what Dyer is now in the Grey
Lands, and they pull bad ghosts out of this world and punish them but
sometimes things slip between cracks or they don’t find the bad
ghosts fast enough. She adds
that some ghosts don’t
understand when jokes stop being jokes at all, and
gives me a very pointed look at that.

I’m maybe trying
to make Jay-jokes but it’s all hard because the house feels bad,
the kind of broken bindings that the humans have to fix themselves
and I’d only break if I fix them, and Charlie asks me to go
upstairs while she deals with the ghost and the parents – because
she can call the ghost into the world as well as eat it, which I
didn’t know before now – and she hurts the humans in different
ways by showing them a world that exists inside the one they live in
and they’re not up for it at all.

The boy is upstairs
in his bedroom, his bum raw from spankings, and he’s all
skinny-thin from lack of meals and the worst of his bruises don’t
show at all because they’re all deep inside, plus his bindings are
all broken, and he’s scared to bind to anyone and the only reason
he hasn’t become a ghost – in the bad way – is because the
ghost left him terrified of dying. Which is a binding worse than
breaking bindings sometimes, if you make them all sour. The room
smells awful bad, and I’m kind of glad I can’t see the bed.

I want to hug him,
but he’s too scared to hug anyone or even touch them because the
ghost did bad-things and he is all scared of me even if I’m a Jay
and I’m really good at not being scary at all, and not just because
I’m really good at hiding that I’m not human. I can’t even see
anymore and I all have a cane and glasses and he’s still all
scared, like there’s not room for anything else inside him. And
since he is scared of everything I just sit on the floor of his
bedroom and say Charlie is all stopping the ghost, but he won’t
believe that at all. I think he might if he sees Charlie, because she
is really scary even without the god inside her, but Charlie is all
busy.

His bindings all
crack, because he knows the ghost is downstairs with his parents and
they’ve hurt him but he wants to save them despite that and that
hurts everything because I don’t think he’d survive the ghost as
he is now and I say Charlie is all dealing with it but he won’t
believe me, and I get up from the floor, moving between him and the
door. He goes to move past, trying to get out of the bed, and he’s
too scared to be afraid of me now and that’s really annoying.

I can Do Things
sometimes but he hurts too much and no binding I make is going to not
hurt him right now, so I tell him I’m not human and we’re here to
help, and downstairs is all a screaming and breaking of things as
Charlie banishes the ghost. Charlie is busy, and Honcho isn’t
around, and the boy is so scared and I can’t help as Jay and I
don’t know what I can do, that isn’t all binding and hugging and
– and –

and I
let him see something else to be scared of to
change his bindings. I show
him some parts of Jay I don’t show anyone at all, not even me! And
he gets how everyone is scared of themselves, and how we hurt
ourselves by never trying to and that his parents hurt themselves in
hurting him and how you can only forgive if you don’t forget. I
teach myself that, too, a little better, and I feel kind of weird
after.

And
the boy sits
back on his bed, and I can
feel him staring at me as if
a Jay has lots of weird heads to
stare at and he’s kind of
scared of me instead of the ghost now. I
don’t even know what I did, only that I flexed something like a
muscle but it wasn’t one and I’m pretty almost certain I wasn’t
Noticed
but I’m all scared and he gets off his bed to hug me
and I don’t dare hug him without hurting him and he goes back into
his bed and under the covers when Charlie comes in.

Charlie’s god is
a monster-under-a-bed she ate it and kids know that and trust her so
the kid believes her when she says the ghost is gone, and she asks if
I’m okay and I say nope, because I’m not, and I don’t say other
stuff at all. The kid remains under the covers, and Charlie doesn’t
know that’s because of me and not her or the ghost so she says his
parents will be coming upstairs later and he should remember how
scared they are. She doesn’t tell him to be nice or nothing, just
to remember.

Charlie takes me by the hand down the
stairs and outside. The parents in the living room don’t pay
attention to us at all and the place is all broken things but
bindings are trying to form again, and I leave them all alone because
I’m not sure what I’d do to them right now. I can walk just fine
with my cane and sensing bindings but I don’t even try and just let
Charlie lead me outside to our van and I let her all hug me inside it
until I feel a little better, and I do the same back.

“That was rough,” Charlie says, and
she means ruder things. “You going to be okay?”

“I don’t know,” I say, because
that’s all true and Charlie doesn’t press me at all and it’s
almost lying but not lying and I’m way too scared to say anything
else. I’ve been more-than-Jay before, but only when desperate or
really mad and most of the
time I don’t let myself remember it, but now I can feel it,
the rest of me inside me like
an itch somewhere really far
away and
also way to close. Tying
not to think about it doesn’t help so I get out my phone and listen
to lots of music until I can try and feel okay again.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”